On December 8, Great Lakes Commons hosted another campfire discussion with supporters across the basin. For the past several weeks and months, everyone concerned about water protection, protecting the sacred, and Indigenous rights have been following this story -- a story pitting people against profits, water against oil, and ceremony and treaty law against state and military power. From the shores of Lakes Ontario, MIchigan, and Simcoe about 10 GLC supporters came together share experiences of visiting the Dakota Nation, the Standing Rock Tribe, and the water protector camps. You can listen to our discussion too.

We might as well frame this stage of Western history as a time of fragedy. Fragedy, to buck the urban dictionary trend, is a drama so comical that its overwhelmingly ludicrous improbabilities trigger in its audience a pathos so fragile that the characters’ plight is no longer funny and enters the realm of the absurd. You know we are living in fragic times when Alec Baldwin and Larry David play the president-elect and the loser with a spookier believability than the Donald and Bernie who play these characters, respectively, in real life.

This is a story of inner growth in the midst of, what Lindsay Swan, our Dante, would call dire outer circumstance. Trigger warning: the following contains mention of botulism and Russian propaganda.